Weekly Wisdom with Ross Tavendale: COPE

Weekly Wisdom with Ross Tavendale: COPE

Modified transcript

Creating content with a view to distributing for mass coverage can really be a challenge. So Google's whole thing since the dawn of time is just "Make good content, and then the traffic will flow." But we all know the whole "Build it, and they will come" philosophy is kind of nonsense when we are talking about SEO. So we have all been in a place where we make a new piece of content, put it out into the world, and we patiently wait for our analytics to spike, but... nothing actually happens, and we just get the same traffic that we always get. So, what went wrong? I really can't cope with this lack of traffic. See what I have done there?

What Is COPE

Today we introduce a concept called C.O.P.E., which stands for Create Once, Publish Everywhere. Essentially it means taking a core piece of content and then spinning it out into little bite-sized chunks that are more suitable for social platforms. By doing this, you can increase your footprint because of these two major things:

You are going to be ranking for a lot more long-tailed terms, which is a form of parasite or barnacle SEO.

You are also now repeating in news feeds more consistently and as a result, are going to get much, much more traffic.

Before I start showing you the Type A's COPE strategy, a little word of advice — you need a home to point people to and capture subscriptions if possible. There is no point in just randomly posting things, because if you are doing that there is no real strategy. Uploading to the platforms and lucking out some of the time will increase your reach and build your audience, but it is not going to help what you could want to happen. Look at some of these big viral news sites. You will notice that they randomly upload a video of a cat. Why are they doing that? It is because they are hacking the Facebook algorithm.

When Type A Media were consulting for the biggest Facebook page in the world, we would post every single hour, but we would only link twice a day. So stage one of a COPE strategy is deciding on the platforms you are going to use and why, and what their main KPI and function are.

COPE Channels

First and foremost, we are going to decide on the primary role of each channel, the content type, content format, posting frequency, and KPI. Once we have decided that, we need to look at our pillar content and decide how it is all going to be distributed.

For this example, let's take the Canonical Chronicle, which is a show I do every week about SEO news. We have got a core piece of content that sits on the site, that is dot com, and that is for lead generation. The content type is Canonical Chronicle, that is the news, and then the format is one long-form video with a blog post, frequency is every single week, and our KPI is ten email subscriptions for that piece, every single week.

When I am actually going to Facebook thinking about that channel, it is completely different than how people will act on the site. Its primary role is brand awareness. I don't actually want to convert anyone at this point. We are going to get snippets of news, so Canonical Chronicle has about five news stories every single week. I am going to cut them in into individual little news stories and seed them out over time. Bite-sized 60-second chunks, every single day. What do I care about? Engaged viewers. I don't actually care if they are clicking it, I just want you to watch and watch and watch.

COPE Facebook Channel

Then we go on to Instagram, the exact same thing, but there is still a little bit of organic to be had inside of Instagram so, I actually want brand growth. I want my Instagram page to be growing over time. What am I going to be doing there? I will use the content. I am going to be taking screenshots, and then I am going to put some sort of call to action or some sort of text over the top of it to share. I am going to do that every single day, and I want to grow the channel.

COPE Instagram Channel

Next up, YouTube. We care about lead generation there; I want you to subscribe to my YouTube channel; this is for the Canonical Chronicle, again, it is long-form and weekly, and I care about subscribers. You are starting to see where all this stuff is starting to develop.

Then we have got Twitter, that is more promotional, we don't actually care if anything happens there. We are doing that five times a day, just blasting you in the face with this constantly. What do we care about? Clicks into dot com.

Lastly is the podcast. Because we have just created something that is long-form, I am going to take the audio from that and stick it onto all the podcast networks. I care about brand affinity at that point. Brand affinity is someone who really cares about the brand, and they keep coming back for more and more and more. I am kind of nurturing you.

In my line of work, in SEO, when you start to go with an SEO agency, you don't do it straight away. It takes you a little bit of time between actually deciding you need something and finding the right one. So I want to nurture you with my podcast. I am giving you commentary on the news that is happened. It is all audio, weekly, and I care about subscribers and listeners — really easy stuff.

All COPE Channels

COPE Content Funnel

So we have now decided all the channels we are going to be using, what we are going to be doing with the content, and what we care about in terms of KPI's. Now, we have to actually have a look at the funnel itself and work out how all of this stuff is going to interact with one another. See, it is all very well and good saying we are going to post on all of these channels, but, how are they interacting? Are we going to point all of this to dot com or are they going to talk to each other?

COPE Funnel

So, from here, this is how I want you to think: going right into the middle, core KPI, for us, leads. That is in the dot com. Then taking one step out, nurture and getting non-paid acquisition. Meaning that, if I am paying for advertising, I want to take you out of the paid funnel and into the non-paid acquisition. I want your email, or for you to become a subscriber essentially. For that, we are going to be using YouTube and also the podcast.

Then, taking one step out from that as well, I care about brand awareness. But we are getting more and more top of the funnel, further away from the sales. To do that I am using Instagram and Facebook, and I care about engagement. Then outside of that, I need you to actually discover this content. For discovery, we will be blasting things like Twitter cause that is very much a discovery type of network.

From here, we are going to start working out how all of these things talk to each other because we have got five Facebook posts, five Instagram posts, a multitude of Tweets and a single video in the middle, a podcast and a YouTube video.

COPE Elements Interaction

At that point, I would start designing the flow and how they are all going to interact with each other and click onto each other. Now, you can see that is with only a very small amount of channels with one single piece of content. So if you have multiple concepts in your content, this can get really complicated really quickly, so it is important you have a decent strategy and decent tactics to implement it so that you actually get what you want.

So that is everything for this week's Weekly Wisdom, we hope you have enjoyed it. Please do comment down below, if you have got any questions for me; I would love to see your social strategy as well. Also, if you want the digital version of all of this, the exact documents we use as an agency, email me [email protected] and an autoresponder will send you a link to all the documents free of charge.

Ross is the Managing Director at Type A Media, an independent search agency that work with FTSE250 companies and mid-sized brands to help them find the optimal way to talk to more people online.
When not obsessing over his clients rankings, he hosts the Canonical Chronicle, a weekly web show watched by 100k people every month.
If you want to ask him a direct question you can find him @rtavs on Twitter.

I love how you put .com right in the heart of everything else. I find a lot of people focus so much on the outer layers,which is social media, but forget about the core which is essentially where it all leads back to.

Great concept. I love COPE. It reminds me of my class learning content strategy and marketing where we learned about the importance of buiding a strong content house. It is essentially similar to having a .com or in a way, to build your own house,domain, website where you have control over your content instead of having your main piece of content over rented houses/properties(social media)

Hey Nasri, thanks for commenting. Yeah, it's interesting that most agencies put the platforms before everything else. At the end of the day, it's lovely to get some free organic promotion on these channels but your site is really where you want everything to be happening. Interesting about your classes. COPE is actually borrowed from CMS builders who wanted you to be able to house content in a singular place and be able to push it out to all the correct properties.